


yours

by polyommatusblues



Category: Begin Again (2013 Carney)
Genre: F/M, First Time, POV Second Person, it'll rot you, so much fluff guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:33:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6794953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyommatusblues/pseuds/polyommatusblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sound of her voice is forever preserved in your mind. She was always going to be yours. Now, maybe she can really be yours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yours

**Author's Note:**

> So. I watched this movie today and the dismissal of this relationship just gave me _a lot_ of feels and my friend encouraged me to write this "for closure!" so here we are.
> 
> All mistakes are my own! And be on the lookout for a Sherlock fic from me in the next month or so, yeah?

You’re walking out of the studio, both high on success, when she starts thinking out loud. And boy, do you love it when she does that. In the time you’ve known her, she hasn’t suggested a lot, but when she does it’s always off the cuff, like she’s joking. You know her better than that. 

“Maybe we should do a bunch of these!” she laughs, her posh accent lilting with every word.

“What do you mean?”

Her smile could set a forest on fire, you think, if you angled the mirror just right. “We could do, like, the European series…” her voice trails off, uncertain, but she’s still got a grin.

Of course, you’re already sold. “I like that!”

She starts rattling off CD titles. “The Paris Tapes, The Prague Sessions…”

“The Berlin Recordings… We could go all over Europe!” This prospect delights you, even though a voice deep in your brain says that might be for the wrong reasons. This time next year, you could be frolicking with her across the continent. Your headphones and her earbuds connected to the splitter that now holds new meaning, dancing around Regent’s Park at midnight, drunk on smog and the constant prospect of rain. She could show you the place where she grew up, or the restaurant in Sussex she used to visit on Sundays because the owner kept bees and would let her take home a jar of honey for free.

Her voice cuts into your daydream. “We could take the whole gang, you know, Rachel, Malcolm, Steve…” Of course, the whole gang. You’d be booking hotels left and right, three rooms if the place was particularly cheap, two if not. You’d never stay with her, you realize. You shouldn’t stay with her. You’re not that strong.

When you both reach your car, she slows her walk. “So,” she says.

“So.” You’re looking back at her. You shouldn’t look back at her so much; it hurts your eyes, sometimes. Like her smile.

She clears her throat. “Well, I guess, um, I’ll see you in a while!” With this, she doesn’t pull you in for a hug; she launches herself at you, winding her long arms around your neck. Yours go around her waist, involuntarily. She has touched you in this way once before. After your only fight, when you yelled at her about your wife, about the pain of that situation, and she ran after you spouting apologies, winding her long arms around your chest from behind, clutching you with her entire body. 

“Thank you,” she breathes, almost like an afterthought. Her breath is warm against your neck and you close your eyes against the feeling of it. You want to laugh because you should be thanking her, really.

All too soon, she moves to pull away, and you can’t bear to see that right now so without thinking, you grab her wrist. She stops and looks at you and you panic, because you didn’t make a plan for this. You don’t know why you caught her, you just did. You clear your throat to buy some time.

“I want to say thank you, too, for, you know. I don’t know if you noticed, but I was kind of a mess when we first met, so.” She’s smiling now, remembering that night at the bar, bokeh lights in her hair as you walked out and she was radiant even then, even when she was broken and alone just like you.

“Oh, believe me, I noticed.” She smirks at you so you know it’s in good nature. Her wrist slides out of your curled hand but she takes it then with her own, fingers curling around yours. You’re reminded suddenly of sitting on the roof of your car, looking out at the city all lit up. A braver man might have kissed her then, or later, when she started spinning that song from _Casablanca_ and got cold, so you wrapped her up in your jacket as Louis Armstrong crooned through her phone.

 _This moment is a pearl, Gretta,_ you had said, sitting beside her on the gritty steps of Union Square Park, people-watching. _All of this has been a pearl._

She took your hand, then, also. While you walked back to Steve’s apartment. You can still remember the way she looked, silhouetted by the dim hall lighting. She led you up the staircase silently, by hand. And then, she let go only to fumble around with her keys, and you both got inside, and the whole apartment was so quiet, you could have almost done it then. Kissed her silly, backing her up to the couch. Or just softly, quietly, against the door. Maybe she would have giggled and offered you tea. Maybe she would have gone very still, politely asking you to leave. 

You’ll never know, really, because you didn’t, then. 

You can now. The same voice that knows you want to be with _only_ her in Europe, fuck the rest of the gang, urges, _You can now._

“You brought me back to life, Gretta,” you whisper on an exhale, and her fingers tighten around yours. It’s no more cliché than talk of strings and pearls, at least, and for what it’s worth, you’re honest with every word.

When you realize she’s still smiling, still holding your hand, you smile, too. “I know,” she says, like a dam breaking. “I know,” over and over again. “Me too.”

A braver man might have let her go. Or a lesser one, just said that it’s pretty to watch her walk away and left it at that. But you’re neither, you’re right in the middle; you used to be something terrible, but now you’re growing. She’s the reason.

You kiss her, right there on the street, for all the times you have not. Your arms curl back around her waist at the same time her fingers bury themselves in the tangles of your bedheaded hair. The two of you kiss and kiss, until you’re backed up against your car and she’s pressing her weight on you, a hand at the back of your neck, angling your head down, your face to meet hers. As if it would be anywhere else.

Eventually, breathing becomes something of an issue. You pull back just enough to inhale and exhale deeply, pressing your forehead to hers. Your noses brush against each other and you’re breathing her air and who would have ever thought that it could feel this good, like you’re twenty-five again and open-hearted to the world.

“I don’t deserve you,” you find yourself whispering, as if it’s a secret.

When she laughs, her nose crinkles up and her eyes get all squinty, and you hear church bells. “You have me, you have me.”

You press kisses into the dimples of her cheeks, the corners of her nose, the ridge where her eyebrows meet. “Okay,” you say with feigned resignation, laughing against her out of the sheer impossibility of it all.

Thoughts swarm at you from all directions. The bare walls of your apartment, spattered with artwork and paint. Decorative pillows on the bed. The two of you skipping madly to the first locksmith you can find, so drenched in anticipation that it fills the whole room. You can see it now: Her face, lit by the early morning sunrise, her hair splayed out across your sheets and sleep still in her eyes. Pause: There will be time for these thoughts later—a lifetime for these thoughts, if you’re lucky. Right now, you’re feeling pretty damn lucky.

You think of rooftops and outdoor café tables, the way she looked with her feet dangling in clear pool water, her lithe form folded around Violet in a hug.

Ever since you heard it for the first time in that bar, the sound of her voice is forever preserved in your mind. She was always going to be yours. Now, maybe she can really be yours.

“You have me,” she says again, kissing your eyelids. “I was just waiting for you to ask.”


End file.
